Tuesday, December 27, 2016

The recent election of Trump as the next US President has re-awakened the issue of military spending. Back in December 2010, I wrote: Casual Observations on Military Equipment/Deployment. Since the issue is once again current, I will re-summarize my casual observations.

My casual thoughts concerning the design and deployment of military equipment:

Following the Christmas mayhem, I decided to take a quick look at my Amazon wish list. In doing so, Amazon provided me with a list of games that they believed I would like to buy. Surprising, as I did did not research any games on Amazon. Then I remembered that Amazon monitors your internet traffic to feed you desired results. (That was one of the prescient take-a-ways of the film: Minority Report. Anyway, I digress.)

My post Christmas wish is that retail companies such as Amazon and Target implement one or more of the following retail policies.

Inform the customers (in big bold print) on the companies retail website of the product deficiencies. For example that the product will no longer work with the current version of MS Windows.

Allow customers to return products, no questions asked, for a full refund.

Withdraw from sale products that no longer function.

The underlying product manufacture should also provide a method for the customer to obtain a full refund in the event that the customer does not accept the odious "terms of service". Retail companies should refuse to sell any products that do not provide such an refund option.

Monday, October 31, 2016

I've been wondering why Democrats fail to speak out against Hillary's corruption and lying. The Republicans certainly don't have a problem attacking Trump and descending into a civil-war.

Good to observe that the Washington Times finally wrote an article on this concern. When will Democrats denounce Hillary? Other newspapers, such as the Washington Post, seem to dismiss Hillary's corruption, incompetence, and lying as a nonissue.

My perspective is that the Democrats won't denounce Hillary because their mindset is stuck in
the feudal ages. They owe their uncompromising fealty to the Democratic
party. Supporting the party takes a precedence over everything, such as being ethical or working in benefit of the national interest. In short, the means justify the end for the Democrats. Hillary is the current Democratic feudal "Queen". As such she deserves total devotion by the Democrats no matter what her character flaws are or how great her incompetence.

This mindless
devotion approaches unbelievable psychotic behavior by Democrats. I can just imagine all
Democrats, like lemmings, gladly racing to jump off a cliff to their deaths in
mindless impassioned devotion to Hillary.

-----------------------

Since posting there has been some breaking news. Longtime Clinton Ally Stuns Fox News Host, Withdraws Support of Hillary on Live Television. Doug Schoen, the long time supporter of Hillary withdrew his support of Hillary. I have heard Doug speak many times, and he seemed like one of the few rationale Democrats. He was not a rabid partisan as most Democratic pundits seem to be. I heard it in passing and I was not sure that I heard it correctly. Guess I did. Maybe be Democratic "dam" is starting to develop cracks. Shoen's withdrawal of support for Hillary may be the first "drip" of many that will eventually develop into a "flood". Only time will tell.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

Be afraid, very afraid of Hillary Clinton's possible justice appointments to the US Supreme Court. Hillary, based on her remarks, will propose to nominate justices who will not use the Constitution as the legal standard of review for making decisions. Note, in the video below, the absence any reference to the Constitution by Hillary. What she does (falsely) claim is that the Court is supposed to "stand on the side of the American" people whatever that means. For a politician, such as Hillary, this is just disingenuous "smoke and mirrors".

The implication of Hillary's response is that she would nominate justices who would not make legal decisions based on the US Constitution. Instead, a Hillary Clinton Supreme Court would; on her subjective assertion that she desires a Court that represents "all Americans", that she will nominate justices who will simply issue decisions based on the political objectives of the Democratic party.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

A fun filled masochistic exercises in programing is trying to figure out why an obvious piece of code fails. I had an HTML form for editing records. The form contained a checkbox for identifying whether the record is "active" or "inactive".

Pressing the submit button sends the edited data to the server, the edited data is then re-displayed on the form. Surprisingly the changes to the checkbox were not re-displayed correctly. Leaving me to wonder why.

My initial belief was that the HTML form when executed would send either a "0" or a "1" to the server since a checkbox is a boolean variable. Turned out, after much experimentation, not to be the case.

Even though the checkbox is a boolean variable it does not send the results to the server in the expected manner as either a "0" or as a "1". If "false" (the checkbox when not checked and the value is the number 0), no value is sent to the server and you get an error message ("An Error Occurred #9").

After some testing the following solution was developed. The checkbox in the form now correctly displays changes after the submit button is pressed.

The Washington Times writes: "Those supposedly spontaneous protesters disrupting events for
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump actually may be
professionals trained by operatives working with the Democratic National
Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.

A yearlong undercover investigation
by the conservative group Project Veritas Action shows Democratic
strategists discussing how they hire agitators — including union
members, homeless people and the mentally ill — to incite violence by
provoking Trump supporters on camera at campaign stops."

According to the Times: "Two top Democratic strategists have exited the presidential campaign after explosive undercover videos showed them discussing voter fraud and their roles in planting paid agitators at campaign events for Republican candidate Donald Trump."

Well at this stage of the election process the resignation of any staff for bad behavior is pretty much meaningless. The damage has already been done and can't be undone by November 8, 2016, election day.

Again, any readers to this article are encouraged to do their own research on this apparent attempt to sabotage the election process by the Democratic party.

The Washington Times writes: "Those supposedly spontaneous protesters disrupting events for
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump actually may be
professionals trained by operatives working with the Democratic National
Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.

A yearlong undercover investigation
by the conservative group Project Veritas Action shows Democratic
strategists discussing how they hire agitators — including union
members, homeless people and the mentally ill — to incite violence by
provoking Trump supporters on camera at campaign stops."

According to the Times: "Two top Democratic strategists have exited the presidential campaign after explosive undercover videos showed them discussing voter fraud and their roles in planting paid agitators at campaign events for Republican candidate Donald Trump."

Well at this stage of the election process the resignation of any staff for bad behavior is pretty much meaningless. The damage has already been done and can't be undone by November 8, 2016, election day.

Again, any readers to this post are encouraged to do their own research on this apparent attempt to sabotage the election process by the Democratic party.
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Wednesday, April 27, 2016

This guide assumes
that logical volumes have been installed and that there is no
volume dedicated to the “home” directory. The process for
establishing a “home” directory using partitions is
described in Ubuntu documentation Partitioning/Home/Moving.
The process for using logical volumes is similar, but involves a
substantially different process. Reading the Ubuntu documentation before beginning will be beneficial.

The nature of
logical volume management (LVM) is described here. What
is LVM

2. Preliminary Step. Determine Volume
Allocations.

Determine the amount
of space that needs to be dedicated to the operating system (root)
and the amount of space that should be allocated to “home”.
Essentially the process you will be following will involve splitting the “root”
volume into two volumes.
One volume will remain "root" and a new volume “newhome” will
be created. In the table below, “root” has an allocation of 915G. Fifteen Gigabytes of data have been installed of which
4.3G occurs within the “home” directory.

Size
of the Hard Disk - 1000G

Applicable Volume

Current Allocation (Usage)

Proposed Allocation

Partition1 (Boot)

0.255

0.255

Root

915 (15)

100

Home

0 (4.3)

815

Swap

16

16

Total (approx)

931

931

Obtain your logical
volume group name and volume name by using the Logical VolumeManagement application. This application is available through the Ubuntu Software Center by entering "LVM". This information is also available through the terminal by issuing the command "sudo lvdisplay" In this example the logical group name is:
“ubuntu-vg”. The logical volume name is “root”.

Backup
your computer before going further!

3. Early Steps.

Boot the computer
from a live CD.

The “root”
volume must be unmounted.

Before attempting to
use “apt-get” to download packagesrun “apt-get update” to get the software list updated should downloading be necessary.

Below are two reference resources that I relied on. Please note that the syntax used in some of the examples provided may not be available in Ubuntu.

6. Modify the "fstab" file to mount "newhome" under /media/home

This can be done before you re-boot or after you reboot into normal operation. From this point on you can follow the prior Ubuntu
documentation on creating a home partition stating with the section: "Copy /home to the New Partition".

a. Run: "sudo rsync -aXS --exclude='/*/.gvfs' /home/. /media/home/. "

8. Modify the "fstab" file to mount "newhome" under /home.

9. Save "old" home by copying to "old_home" and creating empty home folder.

a. Run: "cd / && sudo mv /home /old_home && sudo mkdir /home"

OK to reboot.

Final Notes:I did this once and kept the notes you see above, I will not claim to be any sort of expert. Evidently, importing the text from LibreOffice wasn't helpful in terms of formatting this web-page. Please let me know if there are any correction and/or modifications that would benefit future readers.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Screen shot of the revised main page on my testing version. As much as I hated to do so, I removed the Galaxy cover graphic as being too distracting. Now I have a lot more "real estate" for displaying a magazine's data. I will continue to display the Galaxy cover as the opportunity arises and where it will fit-in.

Other enhancements, from the prior version:

Edit issue and story data directly from the interface.

Edit the names of the story author and the cover artist from the interface.

Add the names of new authors and new cover artists from the interface.

Add missing stories to an issue from the interface.

Previously, to edit and/or add certain data such as those identified above, had to be done through phpMyAdmin.